Yesterday while taking a walk through Belleville, I passed an epicerie that was playing the song "Broken Glass" by Annie Lennox, an artist that I have never really loved but also never hated. I have always held a stance of indifference regarding anything Annie related...until last year.
I had just started working at the American office, where the receptionist would play music from her computer speakers. Her selections were always fairly innocuous, you know stuff that I could ignore; Creedance, Springsteen, Top 40 Pop...and Annie Lennox. This was when Annie's existence was brought to my attention more than ever. She had an Annie Lennox "Essentials" mix on her Deezer account that always reared its head around lunchtime. Your basic Annie Lennox hits could be found on this mix, including the torturous song "No More I Love Yous". I'm not sure if this terrible excuse for a song was added twice on the playlist, or this was the point where the playlist would restart, but either way, I heard this song two times a day for almost two months.
Do you how awful it is to a hear song called "No More I Love Yous" on repeat after you've been dumped and are working in an office where your mail logging capabilities are constantly put into question? While photocopying a 300 page document where I had to keep my finger on the tray to keep the paper aligned and hearing this song howl in the distance, I drifted off and remembered when MF told me that he loved me on a day trip out to Deauville. I also remember telling him that it was too soon, we had only been dating for a week, for crying out loud! But just as easy as it was for him to tell me that he loved me, it was just as easy for him to tell me that he didn't...anymore. It was like a light switch. This was not the first time I had experienced this with Frenchmen where they can't live without me one day and the next, they couldn't be bothered and blow the whole thing off as a nice "histoire". What is it about saying "I love you" within the first few weeks of a relationship that they simply cannot resist?
On a walk through Père Lachaise with May last Friday, we sat on a bench that looked out onto the city and talked about the loves that have come and gone since we've been in Paris. While each of our ex-boyfriends and currents are their own creatures, have different jobs, styles and interests, they all had one thing in common; they all shocked us by dropping the "L" bomb fairly early in the relationship. So it's not just the guys I date, this seems to be fairly common around these parts.
A man, sitting on the bench beside us, who fashioned a bit of a Crispin Glover look (more like creepy, skinny guy in Charlie's Angels than McFly...I know, bummer), began to smirk, inviting me to believe that he understood our conversation and was so not listening to his iPod. I took his eye contact as a queue to welcome (or rather force) him to join the conversation as a special guest live in the studio, to enlighten us American gals on our queries of love in The City of Light. I obnoxiously leaned over May and flat out asked him why "he" proclaims his love so early in the relationship.
"We do what we feel," Crispin said with a smile. Okay, yes I get that, but is "I love you" not as serious a sentence as is it is to us Americans? "I love you means I love you," he added, "but maybe you are too serious in America," He then did the uniquely French Gallic shrug, followed by that fart noise they make with their mouth when they're trying to convey that they don't know and more importantly, don't care. Ladies who live in France, you know what I'm talking about...
What I loved most about Crispin's response was not his nonchalance towards my inquiry but that he was not a drop defensive or insulted by my brazen insinuation that he was like this. He accepted my generalization without argument because he knew that there was some truth to my observation.
In the States, saying the "L" word is perceived as a big deal and isn't a sentence that gets thrown around too often. Having had love brought into several of my French relationships and having had them callously fall apart, I can't help but wonder if "je t'aime" mean something different in French, or rather, does it just hold less weight than it does in the U.S? Or is Crispin right? Are we too serious and tend to put all of our eggs in one basket once we're told "I love you"?
